Obama to tackle economy, security and climate change in Mexico and Trinidad this week

President Barack Obama heads to Mexico on Thursday, en route to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The first stop will focus on the economy and the threat posed to both countries by violent drug trafficking organizations, according to administration officials.

For one thing, Obama is expected to promise Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon that he will speed up the flow of U.S. dollars to combat the cartels, money that was approved by Congress under the Merida Initiative last year but that has mostly not been spent.

But in a press briefing today officials demurred when asked whether the president would support an assault weapons ban, suggested yesterday by Mexico’s ambassador, to help curb the illegal flow of guns to Mexico’s drug traffickers.

Obama did recently announced tougher U.S. efforts to combat the southward flow of firearms, said Daniel Restrepo, a White House adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs. But the president believes “we can make a great deal of headway enforcing the laws that are on the books today,” said Restrepo, without tangling with 2nd Amendment supporters in Congress.

As for the Summit of the Americas, a biennial gathering of Latin American heads of state, Obama teed up the visit with an announcement today that he would relax restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba for Cuban Americans, improve telecommunications links with the island and allow more humanitarian donations, a move some predict could be a precursor to lifting the U.S. embargo.

There’s a strong feeling in Latin America that the United States has neglected its relations with the region in recent years, said Jeffrey Davidow, a former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico and Venezuela and Obama’s special adviser for the summit. The meeting in Trinidad will be the president’s first chance to reverse that view.

“We see this trip as part of a process of the United States re-engaging with this hemisphere,” Davidow, pointedly told reporters during the conference call. “This is not a one-off event.”

As to development, Obama will emphasize that economic benefits ought to be shared equitably. “The President feels very strongly,” said Davidow, “that in this economic crisis, the poorest of the poor, the voiceless, should not be the ones that have to pay a disproportionate amount of the cost of the crisis, and that development should come from the bottom up.”